A Novel Approach to Monitor Deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest by Means of Sentinel-1 and Tandem-X Data

In this paper, we present a novel approach to monitor the evolution of deforested areas in the Amazon rainforest, by combining Sentinel-1 and TanDEM-X SAR data. The idea is firstly to exploit the large coverage and short revisit time provided by the constellation of Sentinel-1 satellites in order to cover the entire arch of deforestation about ones per month. The goal is here to discriminate forest/non- forest by exploiting C-band backscatter signatures in dual polarization together with the behavior of the interferometric coherence in time, in order to identify the so-called deforestation hotspots: local areas characterized by a significant amount of on-going deforestation activities. Secondly, high-resolution time series of bistatic TanDEM-X data can be acquired over these hot spots with a repeat-cycle of 11 days, and used to track fast changes at small scales, aiming at identifying specific on-going deforestation activities. In the final paper, we intent to present more consolidated results, supported by a large scale acquisition scenario.